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Blunting the bane of abandoned online shopping carts

Companies that sell on the Internet know a big problem is when customers “abandon” their online shopping carts – in other words, the consumer never makes the purchase and leaves the web shop.

There are ways to better track those customers with CRM software, including SAP CRM’s e-commerce function, such that you might be able to regain the sale. For example, if you found out a visitor abandoned a purchase because he or she couldn’t find a specific color for an item, perhaps customer service could call the person with information about when the desired color will come back into stock.

CNNMoney.com wrote about abandoned baskets earlier this month. "If you can get just a small fraction of customers to decide to make the purchase instead of leave, you're talking about a business adding potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in sales," Mike Duncan, owner of Warehouse Skateboards in Wilmington, NC, told CNNMoney.

Just yesterday I was discussing our CRM 2011 conference with Patrick Hey, development services
manager at Sycor, and Hey also mentioned the concern of abandoned online sales. Sometimes design issues are to blame, such as a “place this order” button that’s hard to find.

Using SAP CRM to monitor abandoned carts, and then acting on that information, will also bolster customer trust, Hey says.

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